Users engage in a variety of computer mediated communications. For example, users may engage in a conversation involving the repeated exchange of messages, such as email messages, text messages or the like. Although computer mediated communications may be performed for various purposes, computer mediated communications may be utilized in conjunction with the generation of maintenance reports, such as by the exchange of electronic communication between a person describing a particular issue and requesting maintenance to resolve the particular issue and another person, such as a maintenance technician, who responded to the request and is reporting upon the actions taken in order to resolve the issue.
Computer mediated communication generally has two distinct audiences. The primary audience is the person who is the ostensible target of the communications, while the secondary audience is the ancillary computer systems that may analyze, review or otherwise attempt to add value to the communications at some later point in time. For example, ancillary computer systems may include search engines and/or business process analysis engines that review the prior communication. Since the communications are intended to satisfy the requirements of the primary audience, the communications are generally written with the requirements of the primary audience in mind. As such, the secondary audience may have difficulty in subsequently interpreting the semantics associated with the communications since the secondary audience was not involved in the initial communications and may not appreciate the context of the communications.
Although a variety of inference techniques have been developed in an effort to facilitate the interpretation of the semantics associated with a prior computer mediated communication, the various inference techniques have not generally proven to be entirely successful. In order to have a better appreciation for the semantics associated with a prior computer mediated communication, efforts have been advanced by ancillary computer systems to have the creators of the communications explicitly tag the messages with semantic labels or tags during the creation of the messages. These semantic labels can then assist the secondary audience with the semantic interpretation of the communications. However, the creators of the communications have not generally utilized semantic labels, at least not in any consistent fashion, likely because creators of the communication are much more concerned with the needs of the primary audience for the communications, as opposed to the interests of a secondary audience.
Users of the Twitter™ social networking service, however, have made widespread use of hash tags in their communications. While the use of such hash tags is different than the general failure of the creators of other types of computer mediated communications to utilize semantic tags, it is noted that the hash tags utilized by Twitter™ users is embedded directly into the communication messages such that the Twitter™ users view hash tags as an integral portion of the message for their audience, as opposed to a separate and additional requirement that has no value to the primary audience. Additionally, Twitter™ users view hash tags as a shorthand technique so as to reduce the typing that is required during the creation of a Twitter™ message without compromising the contend of the Twitter™ message. Such savings are of particular importance in conjunction with the Twitter™ communications environment in which the messages have a limited length. Notwithstanding the prevalence of hash tags in Twitter™ messages, other computer mediated communications in which semantic tagging has less or no value to the primary audience has not been able to convince the creators of the messages to semantically tag their messages in a consistent manner, even though such semantic tagging would benefit the subsequent analysis of the communications by ancillary computer systems.